Fixing a Broken Democracy with Quality Thinking; COVID-19 update 2

25th August 2020 ~~ The UK is a system, SystemUK, and we fail to recognise this. ~~ "A House Divided Against Cannot Stand" Lincoln said, ~~ we are imploding. Through arrogance, ignorance and negligence our institutions are complicit in this: “The BBC is siding with those determined to divide and destroy what binds us.” ~~ We have educated ourselves for economic, social and environmental decline, blinkered within a multi-planet paradigm that never existed, for a century and a half ~~ and now we face the inviable consequences unless we face this reality head on.

28th May 2020 ~~ The current Dominic Cummings saga hindering SystemUK's pandenic response highlights the underlying reality that our Democratic Process is broken and that it does not know what its 'sole purpose' must be.

The sole purpose of governance under constraint is to identify, enable, defend, and maximise the creation of Essential Value to Society over time, and equitably distribute it at continually reducing Loss to Society.

It is incapable of reacting appropriately to 'impulse' events like the pandemic or the developing resource crisis, and the fact that it has no inbuilt process learning, in-process control and continual improvement process, means an intelligent response is not possible and failure is inevitable on the present trajectory. SystemUK and its citizens fail to recognise this and societal collapse is also inevitable on present performance at system level.

Quality based thinking at system level is the only way forward to provide a viable way to generate viable solutions, as I wrote in 2016, copied here

'All around us we are bombarded with messages telling us that we need to change, that the Earth is warming, that oil is peaking, or we are in an power crisis. The messages are insistent and shrill but diverse and incoherent and all about our symptoms rather than the addiction we suffer, the hugely ineffective use of the resources and sinks that our only planet, the Earth, provides for us. As a result, we are either paralysed into inaction or taking action that is neither systemic nor joined-up, to use a much hackneyed political expression.

Clearly the Earth as a ‘system’ is dynamic and complex and any attempt to describe it quantitatively and accurately is unlikely to lead to any clearer picture of useful action. What we need is a ‘mind model’, something that is powerful and evocative enough to provoke the right questions of societies, communities and organisations. A Mind Model 

‘A conceptual model of understanding, that once created, gives us the power to extract more information from it, than went into creating it.’ Such a conceptual, or mind model is the One Planet Equation.

The One Planet Equation

 We often are told we are enjoying a three-planet lifestyle, and this tells us that what we are doing is clearly not a sustainable state of affairs, but it is not clear from this what we need to do. We have in fact only ‘One Planet’ so the left-hand side of our equation in a ‘resource constrained’ environment is fixed at 1.

The right-hand side is made up of the population, their consumption of goods and services, and a factor which balances the equation. P x C x RI

There are clearly many interactions taking place here and there are inequities in resource distribution among individuals and societies; also the starting point assumes the footprint is no larger than the planet, however, a simple analysis shows us exactly what we need to do and gives us a paradigm in which we can form the correct questions to ask of ourselves, our institutions and our organisations.

We also express the population, consumption and resource factor, or intensity, aggregated as 1 lot of population and Consumption with a Resource Intensity of 1.

So at our starting point we have 1 = P x C x RI or 1 = 1 x 1 x 1 = 1 and as we move forward from this point, the 1 planet remains the same so the right hand product always has to equal one. The only way this can happen in a resourced constrained environment is if the Resource Intensity, (RI) is never more than 1/PC.

Simple compound interest does the rest and we can quickly see that if population stays the same and consumption grows at 5% for 40 years 1/PC is approximately 1/7 and if population grows at the predicted rate and consumption grew at 10% then 1/PC would have to be no greater than 1/70.

In round terms we would need to reduce Resource Intensity by a factor of between 10 and 100 by 2050. We can call this process dematerialisation. This can also be expressed as the ‘first law of sustainability’ that in a resource constrained environment, goods and services can only grow at the rate at which they can be dematerialised

Resource Intensities

 Whilst the above analysis is explicit in what we need to achieve, it will be useful if we can apportion Resource Intensities, within societies, communities, and organisations.

A useful division includes

• The Built Environment
• Governance
• Security
• Mobility
• Fulfilment
• Learning
• Failure Demand

It is clear from this list that they all overlap, which highlights the need to take a systems-based view.

Intensity and Value Added

In this analysis there are areas that are beyond its scope, as the process with the least Resource Intensity is the one that doesn’t exist, and only society, communities, organisations and individuals can decide which are ‘essential’ and add value and which should be eliminated. For example, if a society considers unlimited, discretionary air travel adds value, then businesses will provide it. Whether this is a viable business model in a resource constrained future is a separate issue.

Loss to Society and Genichi Taguchi

Once we have decided whether a process is essential within the bounds of our notion of added value, we have to decide if it is the right process to achieve the desired end and that it is carried out, without loss, correctly every time. That is, we must be effective, by doing the right thing, right and then efficient, by doing it right every time.

Genichi Taguchi inspirationally made the connection that processes without loss were of perfect ‘quality’ and conversely, that less than perfect quality created a ‘loss to society’. It is also important to note that on a resource constrained planet, environmental and social losses can be as much, and perhaps more important than conventional economic ones.

In terms of this article, that loss results in an increase in the process ‘resource intensity’.

Intensity of Failure Demand

“Failure Demand’ is caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer and ‘Value Demand’ – is what the system exists to provide”, – John Seddon.

It is evident that such failure demand within systems will increase their Resource Intensity.

In the list above ‘failure demand’ is shown separately for emphasis but is incorporated in the Resource Intensity resulting from the creation, use and disposal of the other categories. The Resource Intensity of Learning (RIoL) for example.

Continual Improvement

We have in the past thought that we can treat losses in processes as separate and that quality was a function within an organisation, focused on the customer, rather than that which

“Maximises the Essential Value added to and retained by society resulting from the creation, use and disposal of products and services”

This must necessarily involve all an organisation’s stakeholders. It should also be stated, relating back, that it is society that decides what ‘adds value’ within its existent paradigm.

Losses in processes and systems can be environmental, social, and economic and are best minimised by seeing the goal of sustainability as a journey of integrated, continual, quality improvement.

Creativity and Ingenuity

Shewhart created his circle of improvement, Plan, Do, Check, Act and it has stood the test of time but it doesn’t explicitly show the need for the creativity and ingenuity required to drive, integrated continual improvement, towards system sustainability.

A Virtuous Circle that, using ‘in process control’ and a synergy of the entire organisation’s stakeholders and their combined knowledge and skills will enable process learning and after sensing and absorbing the external signals will liberate the creativity and ingenuity within to drive the process design in the direction of sustainability. As the process becomes more sustainable the losses are minimised, reducing the need for appraisal costs and eliminating the costs and risks of internal and most importantly, external failures. With minimised costs and no external failures, the profitability, public perception and value added to society are maximised.

The Right Questions

We have reached a point in our evolution as societies where innovation will shortly transition from being driven by technology and will by driven by resource constraints. It important that as societies, communities, and organisations we ask the right questions based on the tenets that

• our future is resource constrained
• humans are creative and enterprising

These two tenets will ensure that as we transition into our resource constrained future, some organisations will disappear and be replaced; others, with exceptional strategic leadership and management, might survive and grow.

The task is simple, if not easy to accomplish, and again can by reduced to two key questions

• Is our business model relevant to such a future?
• Does our leadership and management, enable the liberation of the creativity required to continually reduce the resource intensity of the goods and services we produce, consume, and dispose of?

This will need the most massive effort of ‘quality improvement’ the world has yet seen.

Conclusion

The message is clear; we must change, but how? Our symptoms are plain for all to see but our addiction, the vast and hugely ineffective deployment of resources to create, use and dispose of the products and services we consume, remains untreated. Calling this addiction, Affluenza may be a representation of the truth in the developed Western Economies, but it does not make clear the path we must follow to effect a cure.

Simply exhorting people to consume less is ineffective as is calling certain Jobs, Products, and services, Green. There are many ‘essential’ jobs, products and services that cannot be considered in this light, many in the public sector, but their resource intensity is crucial in any attempt to balance the One Planet Equation. In the context of this balancing we can say that

‘There are no such things as ‘Green’ jobs, products or services, only those that increase or reduce the ‘Resource Intensity of Society’

This also highlights the absurdity of the Reductionist Paradigm, where Vauxhall Motors, in an ISO14001 video trumpeted energy savings in the order of ￡1m with a payback of 10 months, when GM should have been asking

“How do we evolve our business model and strategy to continually reduce the ‘resource intensity of mobility?”

Finally, the One Planet Equation is immutable, it drives our futures whether we choose to ignore it or not, and we have no option but to enter the future, either by design or negligence. Better, as far as possible by design.'